Catalogue 2008

I have been spending a lot of time lately on the new Heuga catalogue for 2008 as this is one of my annual projects. I work with a design agency called Digital Bubble based in Batley and I am consistently impressed with Gary's ability to turn things around very quickly and his patience despite all the little changes and amends I send to him.

We have some great new products and design features in the new catalogue which I think looks really nice and fresh. I have just sent off the final files to the printer so next week I'll do the final sign off of the proofs. We're all on schedule to get delivery of them before Christmas in plenty of time for people ordering catalogues in January so that's good news!

Design your own rug with carpet tiles

Here's a neat idea for anyone wanting to soften a hard floor with something funky and unique!

Why not create your own rug with carpet tiles?
As long as you stick down the individual tiles - double sided tape is usually best - it is a really nice way of doing something a bit different. I keep hearing people tell me they are fed up with the laminate flooring they installed throughout their home and this is an inexpensive way to warm and soften an area. You can create something really unique by combining different colours and textures (minimum order is 4 tiles, 1 sqm) or simply create a single colour rug.

The stylish Dutch living room pictured above features FunkyFeet Rug which has been in the Heuga range for a while now and this works really well. This was created with FunkyFeet Rug in colour Onyx and laid on top of a hard and cold stone floor.

Our 123's package works really well in kids bedrooms and playrooms as this is a pack of 12 carpet tiles (3sqm) including numbers 1-9 and +, x and -. In the picture on the left this is installed amongst matching plain colours in PuzzlePieces, but this works equally well on a laminate or wooden floor to protect small (and big!) feet from the cold!

In the 2008 Heuga catalogue we will be launching a number of fabulous rug packages that combine different ranges from the Heuga collection - they are really stunning and I'll try to get some pics on here as soon as I can!

Ideal Home Show, Ireland

This week I travelled over to Dublin for the Ideal Home Show. A lady called Anne Ellard was one of the finalists in the Ideal Homes Interior Designer of the Year award with her entry 'Eco Chic Bedroom' and she used our fabulous FunkyFeet carpet tiles in her showcase.

Anne's showcase featured dark wood furniture with accessories and furnishings in light nature-inspired shades and it was a beautiful room set. She had installed a border of FunkyFeet in colour Barn stone around the bed within a main floor of FunkyFeet in colour Pearl.

I visited the show with Malcolm James, pictured with Anne in her showcase room.

Malcolm is an Account Manager for Heuga Home Flooring covering Ireland.

Malcolm and I were both thrilled to see the room design and the response to our flooring. Anne told us that she had been inundated with people asking about the fab shagpile flooring and she had quickly run out of Heuga catalogues to hand out.

Anne is based in Waterford City offering interior design advice for homes.

She is particularly interested in sustainable yet stylish interior designs and this is reflected in the room she designed for the show.

See her website at http://www.anseomragalanta.com/index.html

Heuga TV advert

We have a great new Heuga TV advert in the making which should be hitting the screens in the UK next week.

This is all around making flooring fun and being creative with your floor using Heuga carpet tiles. Initially this is fairly small scale and will be featured on digital lifestyle channels, however we are hoping to work on a load more publicity and promotions in the coming months.

Click on the link below (Heuga.com/create) to see the page I have put on Heuga.com that we will promote in the advert.

http://www.heuga.com/create

Heuga Sales Launch

We had our sales launch last week which was a mixture of informative presentations along with some fun. Most of the informative stuff was around the launch of our new wool carpet tiles range ComfyCord as covered in a previous post.

The fun stuff involved a golf clinic which was quite fun (although I don't think I'll be taking up golf as a hobby!)

We also hired bikes (in true Dutch style) to go riding across Holland to get to a boat.

I managed to grab a few snaps of the team including Patrick Riley (Heuga Managing Director) whilst riding along - much to the amusement of my colleagues as I tried to ride in a straight line.

In true dedication to his customer, Ton (one of our Dutch Account Managers) was talking shop whilst riding along!

We had some dinner on the boat and travelled round the little island where we were staying then rode back to the hotel - this time in the dark after one or two beers which was interesting and luckily we all got back safely!

It was a nice evening and a really good opportunity for the Heuga teams to chat with each other.

Maarten Brons organised the event and did a great job - even providing ponchos for us all in case it rained (which, luckily it didn't!)

As you can see from the photo, Maarten enjoyed himself too!

Heuga Brochure Viewer

My contribution to the sales launch was presenting a couple of tools we have developed on the Heuga website. One of these was the Virtual Room Tool covered in an earlier post and the other was our new brochure viewer which is another new play thing on Heuga.com

This brochure viewer means you can flick the pages of our catalogue online and click on products to go straight into our online catalogue to order samples and view more details about products.

You can click on the magnifying glass cursor to zoom in on the pages and you can click on the product name or tile image to find out more about the product.

This tool requires flash to view. Please click here to see this on our Design Assistant page on Heuga.com.
http://www.heuga.com/InterfWhyHeuga/uk

ComfyCord 100% Wool

We are having our internal Heuga sales launch meeting this week and we will be mainly talking about our new comfycord wool carpet tiles.

These are our latest range - soft ribbed floor squares available in 6 natural colours. I think this is a really good looking range and it is installed quarterturn for a subtle patttern.

As a major plus point for this launch, comfycord is climate neutral flooring. Click here to go directly to Heuga.com to read a bit more about that...

Now I've got all the product details online, I am finishing off the email campaigns that will go out to all our online customers in the UK, Holland, Germany, France and Belgium. I will need to present these to our team tomorrow so best get on with them!